[“Securing and preparing food, ensuring it’s safe to eat, being emotionally supportive, being considerate of other people’s complex needs, transporting people, being patient, and finding ways to laugh, be affectionate, have desire, cry, hug, and hold all take immense time and effort. So does navigating the information, bureaucracies, institutions, laws, and rules that regulate our bodies, relationships, and health.
Too many men with influence and power are willfully ignorant about what it takes to keep people alive and well, from the cradle to the grave. They know so little about the intense attention, emotional labor, mental load, and physical demands required to tend to other people, to bodies and their sustenance and well-being.
Because men buffered from intense care demands still make up the vast majority of our political leaders, senior corporate executives, and economists, care demands are chronically undervalued and misunderstood in resilience agendas. Instead, by unspoken and exploitative consensus, mothers, nurses, teachers, health aides, and other people who quietly do the messy work of caring are supposed to do it selflessly, ideally without complaining. At least half of the country genuinely believes women should sacrifice themselves to this crackpot scheme. Worse, as countless internet armchair experts are keen on perpetually and ridiculously pointing out, if women pay a personal price, so be it, because men go to war.
A powerful undercurrent of resilience today is a cultural hostility that maintains that if clamorous women want equality, then we must earn it on preexisting terms and by the standards men have always been held to. Women should sacrifice and be dedicated and ruthless if they intend to compete with men for jobs, money, and influence. Instead of protesting stubborn norms and resisting systemic inequalities, women—in the conventional mold of hardy and resilient men—are supposed to work hard, all the time, and be optimistic, gritty, and grateful.
In the face of obstacles, successful women and good girls know how to take control and turn challenges into opportunities; transform themselves and take a seat at the table. Resilience here is a therapeutic and decidedly capitalist self-management, which would include demonstrating the strength to recognize, for example, sexism as a problem, but to persevere, nonetheless. The Lean In, Confidence Code, and Girl Boss movements of the past ten years aren’t feminist as much as they are expressions of resilience along these lines.”]
soraya chemaly, from the resilience myth: new thinking on grit, strength, and growth after trauma, 2024
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